Tag: creativity assignmets

Another week, another assignment down the list extracted from Harold Davis article series Becoming a More Creative Photographer, seventh assignment, improving mistakes.

Your assignment: The next time something goes wrong with a shoot, grab the problem, turn it into a possibility, and make it the basis of a photograph.

Auto-focus, that friend that gets it right most of the time, kind of. Yes, I am guilty of usually relying on autofocus most of the time, mainly as a way to remove one var out of the equation. You can chose where you want the auto-focus easily and the camera does the rest. Mostly. There is a scenario where it always goes wrong. You have a composition where you have objects in the far back and an object in front which you look through. Most of the time, your friend auto-focus will decide to focus on the background, likely because it covers most of the frame. So how would the moment in time if I choose the other option?

You get something intriguing. A fence to something uncertain. A fence that dilutes the clear-cut and turns it into an image of interpretation. The changed focus trap an eluding reality giving it a transcending quality. It makes the dirt and unfinished lines into textures. It also turns non-exciting lights into puzzling flares of unknown dusk. I am wondering if it could improved further with another mistake, over/under exposure. Maybe for the next round of experiments. Endless possibilities for improving mistakes.

I had the assignment done last week, but I was a bit busy and I could not put it out. Enough excuses, the assignment from the list extracted from Harold Davis article series Becoming a More Creative Photographer, sixth assignment, or making the ordinary visually appealing

Your assignment: Pick something that you’ve looked at often, and that you think is visually boring. Now, let go of your preconceptions about your subject. Study it carefully. Find something you haven’t observed before about it, and make an interesting image using this new aspect of your subject.

I was a bit uneasy with this one for a bit. Something I look often. Something that I see everyday and it do not even bother anymore to consider appealing. I just realized that there are so many thing around that I just do not even consider them photographically interesting. Dead wrong. I just realized during this assignment that each object, path, light are just a chance for getting a fleeting moment crystallized into a unique snowflake. Also, the more I tried to get a new view of the object I see everyday and found uninteresting, the more puzzled I was about what should I use as an ultimate shoot.

Eventually I gave up and stop thinking about what object I should shoot. A couple of days later, I was playing with the camera and the focus mechanisms slowed down to the point I took a pretty blurry shoot of my shoe. That was a pretty boring picture, but the blur turned the picture into a collage of colors. There, I grabbed my camera and went down and shot a few pics totally out of focus. The above photo is what it came out. Not something I would have thought about shooting consciously. And yes, I added a few tone corrections and grain to the final image.

This week assignment from list extracted from Harold Davis article series Becoming a More Creative Photographer, is the fifth assignment, or taking pictures without your camera.

Your assignment: Without a camera, observe a scene closely. What abstract pattern or patterns can the scene be boiled down to visually?

Staring up, light pours in trough the window softly fading away. The ceiling beams gently guide it through the room space. I am trying to think what are the basic visual patterns in which I could decompose the scene. Maybe the first one would be the window acting as the vanishing point for the main beam and the angled ceiling. It looks pretty simple as a visual construct.

However, if I had to choose one abstract pattern that remains consistent and powers the image across the scene, that pattern would be line repetition. It starts on the window. Repeating lines define it. Beam lines emanate from it. They define the basic resting guidelines for the parallel and perpendicular lines to rest and repeat. Even when the scene gets abruptly interrupted, the guiding and recursively repeating lines emerge again with slanted generative angles.

In case you wonder, yes, I just took the camera after I finished the assignment so you could see what I was staring at

Going down the list of assignments extracted from Harold Davis article series Becoming a More Creative Photographer, the fourth assignment challenges you to post-process it like you mean it.

Your assignment: Shoot a commonplace object with digital post-processing specifically in mind. Using your favorite image editing software, transform the photo of the commonplace object into something new and abstract.

This was a tough one. I am still not sure I got there, but I took it as a change to get out of the usual comfort zone. Yes, color. No, monochrome. Yes, post-processed till you cannot tweak any more knobs to get the image you want. If the previous assignments got me warmed up, this could be soul crushing if I took it too seriously.

Choosing the picture was actually easy. After a week of scratching my head, I remembered an itch. A snap I took while passing by Zürich back in June. I knew I wanted to do something with it, but never got my head around it. Monochrome did not make justice to the moment I released the shutter. The shoot of a bridal store front got my eye, memories, and imagination. It was bold. It was eye-catching. It was full of color. It was sitting there, ignoring and defying the sobriety that surrounded it. It also had another ethereal property: if you discretely check the people walking by it, almost every street-walker tried to hide their furtive glances.

There was no option. This moment was the image I had to post-process. Monochrome was not going to cut it. It will lose the magnetism that challenged your gaze. Also, it was way out there on the left field of the comfort zone. So there I went and start post-processing trying to turn it into that giant magnet that trapped people’s imagination while walking by. Yes, I have to admit that I may have failed turning it into an abstract image, but this was exciting new territory and I guess I could not cover it in a single shoot. So, I just sat in front of the digital darkroom and post-process that moment like I mean it.

Another week, another photography assignment extracted from Harold Davis article series Becoming a More Creative Photographer. The third assignment reads as follows:

Your assignment: Wait until you are feeling no inspiration and stuck in a rut. Choose a single lens, set it at a single focal length, and use aperture-preferred metering to choose one f-stop. Start taking photos. I guarantee that you will be surprised with what you come up with. This exercise is a great way to reinvigorate your photography generally and get out of a rut.

This week I had to visit Seattle for a couple of days. I love the trips to Seattle, such a change of pace. Tempted to leave my camera behind since I was not going to have much time for roaming around and, honestly, wasn’t very inspired when it came down to photography. So, before leaving home I decided to check Harold’s next assignment on the list. I just could not believe it. Really? OK. I grabbed my camera and threw it into my backpack and forget about it. The first day went by and after work I was walking back to the hotel. A bit reluctantly, I remembered the assignment and pulled out the camera. Not hard to choose a lens and a focal length. My x100s just has one lens and one focal length (the equivalent of a 35mm). I did not pick an aperture, the camera was on automatic aperture, so heck, who was I to go against the will of my camera.

I started walking on the way back. At the beginning I had to honestly push myself to take random pics. The day was gorgeous and the Fremont and marina area could not be a better scenario. After 20 minutes, I finally warmed up and start thinking about the possibilities around. After 30 minutes, I was wondering why I wanted to left my camera home. Really!? The walk back to the hotel eventually end taking 3 hours. The outcome? I was hocked to my camera again. Also 173 pictures. Yes, some of them are not even worth looking, but a few of them got me pretty happy to have forced me to take the assignment. It was not only about geometry, composition, and exposure. It was also about serendipity. Taking a step back and see what was going around. Would it be better if I wait a few seconds for everything to fall into place? How can I move around to get a different view of the scene unfolding in front of me? What can make this picture not absolutely dull? Anyway, as I said, I was glad that I forced myself to keep on the assignment track and that it got me out of the rut.

In “Assignment 1: Photograph a Reflection” I started taking on the assignments that Harold Davis proposes in Becoming a More Creative Photographer. The second assignment reads as follows:

Your assignment: Pick an everyday object where you live. Make your mind a blank and forget everything you know or associate with the object. Try to see it with new eyes. Find out what is interesting about the mundane object, and create an image based on this interest.

And here we go. Thinking about the assignment took me hours. Taking the shoot above, just a few minutes. I guess that regardless of the photograph, the first thing that stroke me was how unbalanced was the time spent on both parts of the assignment. I decided to not even have the camera with me when I started thinking about the assignment. I am happy now that I did it. I bet I would have taken the probabilistic approach if I have had it with me. I bet I would have shot pictures compulsively and then I would have tried to pick one that fitted the assignment. This was actually and interesting mentality change. I read many times that professional photographers usually have very tight and limited windows to shoot at certain locations trying to beat a deadline. They usually talk about how much planning they have to do ahead to get the image they envision in a race against the clock. For example, check Joe McNally’s video where he deconstructs and hints how much planning ahead for a photo shoot in New Orleans.

The main difficulty of the exercise, for me, was to pick a common object. As you can guess there are tones of them around, which one should I pick? Why should I pick that one and not another. Eventually, I decided to stop thinking about it, and just took a deep breath and picked the first one that came to mind. A red mug. That’s it. A red Seattle’s Best Coffee mug. OK. Who am I to not follow the rules of the assignments. Also the red mug plays nice with the red notebook I use to scribble the ideas for the assignments. So I got down the path of combining the red mug and the red notebook. I could even poorly sketch a mug on my notebook.

Also, the mug is tactile, but it feels way on the other side of the spectrum of the notebook soft red skin. A contrast and duality that expands, contrasts and defines both. Warm and cold, isolating and social, inviting and rejecting, exciting and relaxing, new and old, usable and relegating, personally unique and impersonally factory produced, comfortable touch and finger pain, quick thought and deep reflection, locally made and far away imported, curved and frameless, possibilities and missed paths, heart warming and mind damaging, approachable and impersonal, future certainty and daily scramble, round knob and tall order.

All open interpretations of a daily object with no meaning. Open container where we pour our own meaning, anxieties, and hopes. Framing it, transforming it, redefining it at every moment, into something we conquer by owning the illusionary meaning of the common object.

Having all these set, I had an approximate idea of the image I wanted to produce. The mug, the notebook, and the sketch of the mug. How long did it took me to take the picture. Two minutes plus 5 more for a quick retouch and upload. I only shot ten frames with different relative arrangements between the objects, and angles trying to use the natural light in different ways. From the ten frames, three stood up, and only one survived the post processing. The picture is unlikely a head turner, but for me it was. It showed me another path to photography, the one where you take pictures in your head and then at the end of the process you get your camera out and just materialize that elusive flickering image, even if it is just a picture of a common object.

Halsman defines creativity and imagination as Une Tournure D’Esprit in his book The Creation of Photographic Ideas. He also proposed a set of rules to help developed your photographic creativity. Some target your logic thinking, some target your unconscious. I was tempted to start practicing Halsman rules, but they felt a bit daunting and I was a bit lost on where to start. Where they written in order? Should I just focus on one of the rules? Should I stop thinking about it or just stop thinking about it and let it permeate for a while? Hence, I decided to dig a bit more around just to see if I could make my mind about what path to take.

After reading a few, not very interesting webpages and blog post, I finally run into Becoming a more creative photographer by Harold Davis. A collection of seven articles written back in 2009 which target how to help you develop your photographic creativity. And yes, the bottom line is to keep shooting no matter what, as you may have guessed. However, each of the seven articles target a specific topic for development. Also, along the way each article lists a sequence of assignments for you to practice around the discussed topic. If you have some time and curiosity, go and check it out. I am sure you will find something useful there. “Expecting the unexpected” is the first article of the series. The first assignment on the list reads as follow:

Your assignment: Photograph a reflection (in water, in a mirror, etc) so as to convey an entirely different world.

Actually, when I read about this one I just smiled. I did it even before I read the article and decided to take the assignments route. This looked promising. I had the opposite problem, now I had to choose one reflection picture that conveyed the idea of an entirely different world.

Talking about open interpretations in a sentence. I guess that is the goal, to force you to explore all possible interpretations of your images and see where do they take you. I eventually chose the picture shown above. What eventually pushed me to choose this one over a few others was that it shows both worlds, but with a subtle, ephemeral, and easy to miss reflected world. Moreover, it showed the reflected world as a narrow, flickering, and easily missable invitation to get you transported to a realm of unknown and uncertain rules. To a time long passed. To the place where your actions shaped your path. To the spot in time that enabled you to now be there staring at the ephemeral doorway to hypotheticals.